


If this were a story, it would mean something

by lemonadesoda



Series: And I don't think you hate this as much as you wish you did [3]
Category: A Hat in Time (Video Game)
Genre: Dadtcher, Family Bonding, Fluff, Gen, Human!Snatcher, Nonlinear Chronology, Oh the Humanity AU (A Hat in Time), Slice of Life, oth!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27767215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonadesoda/pseuds/lemonadesoda
Summary: (Ah. Let's take a moment to breathe. Step back a bit. The little moments matter, you see.)
Relationships: Bow Kid & Snatcher (A Hat in Time), Hat Kid & Snatcher (A Hat in Time)
Series: And I don't think you hate this as much as you wish you did [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999939
Comments: 12
Kudos: 92





	If this were a story, it would mean something

**Author's Note:**

> Technically, this takes place around the week 5 mark, so it's overlapping with some of the previous stories. It's not that important to know precisely though.

Snatcher wanders in and out of the rooms of the empty spaceship. The kids are out again on one of their little missions. How many more stray hourglasses they have left to collect, he has no idea. They sure made a mess of everything with their arrival to the planet...The lights detect his presence and awaken as he enters each room, staring into the quiet space for a few seconds before turning and leaving again. There are many things he’s resigned himself to by now, but he still hates being left alone in the tangle of hallways and humming machinery. Space is cold, silent, and dark, and the walls that keep out the void never quite seem thick enough at times like these. How do the kids live this way?

Not for the first time, Snatcher laments the numerous books he has locked away in his pocket dimension that he won’t see again until the kids fix the Time Piece. In their reading corner, he picks up the tablet they lent him and pokes at the digital library. He flicks a finger across its smooth surface, sighing at the memory of crisp paper and the weight of a proper bound book, before tossing the tablet onto the beanbag chair. It rebounds off the springy cushion and he scrambles to catch it, bobbling it several times midair before it clatters to the floor. The tablet remains unblemished from the collision as it blinks up at him from the ground, and Snatcher scoffs at the effort he put into saving it. If only he had just broken that instead of the Time Piece. He walks away, leaving it there in the middle of the floor and continues his restless circuit about the ship.

It isn’t Subcon--despite appearances, the forest is very much alive, and its absence grates at him like a missing limb. Everything feels just a tiny bit off-tempo, like each step he takes is one beat behind the metronome. He runs a hand along the cool metal of the walls, searching for a sense of feedback, of life. Maybe with time, he’ll learn the pulse of the ship too, but it took him centuries to do that for his forest. Until then, this place is an inanimate box with a pale electric heartbeat.

He discovers the hidden stash on what’s probably his third loop around the ship, and he’s started opening random cupboards and panels. Most of them have mystifying circuitry or piles of garbage nonsense that he promptly slams the door on, but one closet in a back room opens up to an assortment of proper, old-fashioned books. Snatcher’s eyes widen, and he can’t stop himself from rummaging.

This is how the kids discover him, sitting in the doorframe of the closet with a book hanging open in one hand as he reads a different book in his other hand. He doesn’t even look up at first until Bow exclaims, “My books!”

Snatcher jolts, but even then, with a split second of delay. Bow hurries over to inspect her collection, while Hat watches him on the verge of an eyeroll.

“You’ve been holding out on me, kid,” he tells Bow as she reorders her closet. “Making me read on that stupid tablet all this time.”

She gives him a baleful look in the middle of tidying up. “You break things a lot,” she mutters.

“I know how to keep books, kid. I have a lot.” He snaps the ones he’s holding shut, and she flinches at the sound and then purses her lips at him as if to say  _ See? _ Snatcher shrugs. “They’re fine!”

“We can fix tablets that get broken, but if the book gets damaged, I can’t just redownload the story!” Bow Kid crosses her arms and pouts. “You knocked over your tea like twelve times last week.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “It wasn’t  _ twelve. _ ”

She shakes her yet, tugging the books he’s holding from his grip. “Okay, yeah, but it was a lot. You got some on the tablet.”

“Yeah, I had to fix that one, butterfingers,” Hat Kid quips from across the room.

“Hey why don’t I tape your fingers together and see how well you can handle life with only two?”

“You break things no matter how many you have, so I bet I still win!”

“Oh? A wager is it?” Snatcher’s grin curves into something resembling his old self. “You think you can go even a day with a hand-swap without dropping anything?”

“Psh, I know I can. How hard can it be?”

He rubs his hands together. “And if you can’t? You have to do whatever I say for the rest of the week without giving me any lip.”

“Well, when I win, you have to-”

“Okay!” Bow Kid cuts in, before the two of them get fully revved up. Hat Kid subsides immediately, killing the bickering momentum. “You can borrow my books, Snatcher, but you  _ have _ to take care of them, okay?”

“I got it, kid, trust me,” Snatcher says. He and Hat Kid shoot each other a look that says  _ this isn’t over. _

“Bad idea,” Hat Kid says under her breath, but averts her gaze when Bow sighs in her direction.

“It’s really important,” Bow Kid says with gravitas. She holds out the book she had previously taken from him.

He makes sure to be ginger about taking it, just to assure her that he’s not going to immediately set it on fire. For all Hat Kid’s skepticism, he actually does want to continue this arrangement. “I told you, I got it. I’ll write you a contract.” This last statement actually does seem to encourage Bow enough to smile and skip out of the room after Hat Kid.

Snatcher draws up the contract later that day, because he  _ does _ take these agreements seriously, thank you very much. It’s a pain to write it all out by hand on torn out sheets of note paper, made all the more difficult by the lack of non-sparkly pens in the spaceship. Glittery purple is...pretty fun actually, but it’s not for legal documents, and he’s not compromising on that.

“Why is my soul still collateral?” Bow Kid asks when she reads the contract. “I’m the one lending you my stuff.”

“Eh, force of habit. We can negotiate. Look, stay focused, it’s the principle of the matter here.”

She glances up at him and takes the pen he offers. Having apparently learned from Hat Kid’s example, Bow crosses out the terms of the contract she doesn’t like before signing. He hovers over her shoulder and scans the edits. “If I damage your books, I have to make you a new outfit  _ and _ buy you twice as many new books to replace it? What’s with you two and scalping me for everything I have?” This is why he remembered not to sign it in advance.

Bow Kid pulls the contract out of his reach. “I told you, they’re really important to me. If you’re not going to take it seriously, I’ll hide them!”

“Okay, okay! I’m just not going to ruin the stinkin books, keep your socks on.”

“My socks  _ are _ on...”

“Ugh, figure of speech, kiddo, do we have a deal or not?”

She unfurls the contract and holds it out to him. Snatcher presses a hand to his temple before signing himself. Yeesh. Business transactions are so much easier when you’re the one extorting some schmuck for the privilege of remaining alive. Well, the deal is sealed at least, and the library of Bow ought to tide him over for a while before he’ll have to resort to the damn holo-tablet again.

Eager to have a real paper book in his hands again, he immediately hunkers down in one of the beanbag chairs and gets lost in the story. As a ghost, he couldn’t really sleep properly, which was convenient for avoiding nightmares, but it left hours on end for him to occupy his wayward mind. Books had always been an ideal escape from the afflictions of his present reality, and this time is no exception. At the very least, in storybook world, when things went wrong, there was a purpose to it and even tragedies had meaning. It’s comforting to imagine that all the bad things that happen are a part of a bigger picture. After three centuries, Snatcher knows if fate exists, he is its enemy, and it’s all a matter of seizing whatever control you can in the battle against it.

He sinks deeper into the beanbag with a sigh, realizing he’s gotten a little too distracted. This human mind is too prone to wandering, just like the old days. Much like the spaceship, the walls in his head don’t seem strong enough to fully keep the creeping emptiness at bay, and much like a spacefarer, he’s been floating untethered on a path he can’t see. How did he live this way? Snatcher focuses harder on the page, letting the words wash soothing eddies over his gnawing disconnect.

* * *

Snatcher suppresses a guffaw as he watches Hat Kid struggle to pick up her mug with her hands in a pair of puffy mittens. The handle of the mug is slightly too small for her to get the large finger portion through--normally not a problem when she has the use of all her fingers independently, but Snatcher has wagered she couldn’t adapt to his old appendages any better than he’s been adapting to the five-fingered life.

“Don’t drop it, kid. Stay focused. Don’t drop it! Careful, kiddo! Careful!” he says, escalating in volume as Hat Kid grits her teeth. She opts to grab the mug around its circumference so she can carry the plate of sandwiches out of the kitchen along with it. “Ooh, I don’t know about that, kid. You holding tight enough?”

“Shut up! Distracting is cheating.”

Bow sits on the counter, kicking her legs up and down. “You could just carry them one at a time, Hattie.”

“Nope! She’s gotta live like she normally lives!” Snatcher smirks as he props himself against the counter next to Bow and watches Hat Kid carefully stroll across the kitchen, trying to stay casual but holding her dishes in a vice grip. “Unless you want to admit it’s too hard, and you want to quit, of course. I’ll ease up on the terms if you grovel a little now.”

“Unless you want cheese in your hair, you better be quiet. These mittens have no traction!”

“And ghosts don’t have fingerprints, so get used to it!”

Right as he says this, the mug slips like a fish from her hand and shatters on the floor, splashing chocolate milk everywhere. Snatcher whoops. “That was faster than I thought! You were so much worse than even I expected!” Then a sandwich hits his face. It’s a little harder to be smug when he has to wipe mustard off his face, but she still has to do whatever he says without back-sass for the rest of the week. Speaking of which, “I think throwing a sandwich at me counts as back-sass.”

“No way, you played dirty! You messed with my concentration!” She throws the other half of the sandwich. Snatcher ducks it and it splats against the door of the cupboard.

“Shouldn’t we be cleaning?” Bow Kid asks. The puddle of milk continues its expansion across the tiles.

As if on cue, the kitchen door slides open and Cooking Cat stands in the threshold, eyes wide, just as Snatcher has his arm lifted to fling a soggy tomato back at Hat. “What on Earth is going on here? I heard something break.” She glares at Snatcher. “This kitchen is a mess.”

He flicks the tomato in Hat Kid’s direction and it flops to the ground at her feet. “Isn’t it? You’ve got a big job ahead of you, kiddo.” She turns a mutinous stare on him.

“You’ve  _ all _ got a big job, far as I’m concerned,” Cooking Cat says, ears flat.

“Not Bow! She didn’t do anything,” Hat Kid protests.

Snatcher continues lounging. “The kid lost a bet, and she has to pay up because my first order is taking my share of the clean up job.”

“You two may have a deal, Mr. Snatcher, but you and  _ I _ do not, and I’m not letting you out that easy.”

Snatcher laughs for a second but freezes at the sight of Cooking Cat’s narrow gaze. As friendly as she’s been till now, it occurs to him that he doesn’t know for sure that she’s above braining him with a rolling pin. “Oh. You’re serious.”

This is how he ends up mopping the kitchen with Hat Kid. Cooking Cat, assured of Bow’s innocence, leaves her in charge of supervising, so Bow Kid watches them from her perch on the counter corner again.

Janitorial tasks were things he always left to his contractors, and no thanks to that cat, the kid should be one of them. In the weeks he’s been living here, everyone ganged up on him and forced him into the chore rotation--especially frustrating when the kids definitely did not uphold their part on a regular basis, leaving him to choose between living in a zoo of toys and dirty laundry or shouldering their forsaken cleaning burden himself. Subcon may not have looked it, but Snatcher liked a certain order to his life and put a lot of contractors’ work into maintaining it. Things are doubly gross, now that he’s corporeal, so there’s only so much mess he can tolerate and that threshold is much lower than the kids’.

Still, there’s a certain mundane rhythm to cleaning. His mind settles as he swipes the mop back and forth across the floor. In a way, it serves the same purpose of distraction as his continuous pacing. The repetitive motion absorbs his otherwise simmering thoughts, and there is some satisfaction to seeing a previously gunked up section of tile wipe away sparkly clean. It’s even almost peaceful for once...right up until the moment he mops over Hat Kid’s shoes in his distraction.

“Ugh, seriously?”

“Calm down, kid, for once it wasn’t on purpose.”

“Yeah, right. My toes are soggy now. And by the way, I still haven’t eaten lunch!”

“Shoulda held onto it better, huh,  _ butterfingers? _ ”

“You distracted me!” She flicks her mop at him and sprays him with grimy water.

Snatcher yelps and swipes the splatters off his face. “Agh! Gross! Don’t blame me for starting this one!” He dunks his mop into the bucket and flies his retaliating splash at her.

Hat Kid squeals as she holds her cape up to catch the brunt of the water. They go back and forth for a few swipes, before she runs over to her bucket and pulls out a sopping sponge that was meant for wiping the counters and hurls it at him. She’s a hard thrower, so it actually stings a bit when it smacks him clean in the face. Both she and Bow slap hands on their mouths, stifling giggling

Snatcher groans as the sponge peels off and hits the floor. His shirt is soaked and smells like a combination of swamp and citrus soap. “Okay, kid. This is war. I think some got in my mouth.” He reaches down, painstakingly, and picks up the soggy sponge.

Hat Kid snickers, hoisting the mop up in a defensive posture. Snatcher flings it, she deflects it, Bow shrieks. When he looks up, and Hat slowly turns around with her eyes wide, Bow is holding her dress out, with a giant water stain all down the front.

“Sorry!” Hat Kid squeaks.

Bow’s expression goes flat, but of course, she’s not blaming her friend for this one. No, of course not. Everyone teams up on Snatcher. She hops from the counter, and before he can figure out what she’s planning, a deluge descends upon him. Standing before him, Bow holds out the now-empty bucket, still at the end point of her fling, and he’s dripping from head to toe. Even Bow looks shocked at the results. Soapy water coats the floor, pooling in the corners and threatening to leak out into the hall. Snatcher stands still for a few seconds, uncomfortably aware of the damp contact of his clothes on his skin. He wrings his hands out in two brisk shakes. Then all hell breaks loose.

He and Hat Kid fence with the mops, while Bow runs interference by throwing sponges and splashing the puddled water at him. Somehow Hat Kid’s mittens, which have also been soaked, come back into play. Bow drops one down the back of his shirt, and he drops the mop in alarm as he scrambles to yank it out. 

“Surrender! You’re disarmed!” Hat Kid shouts as Bow steals his fallen mop.

In his thrashing, his foot slips in the suds, and he drops hard onto his back, wheezing as the air is concussed from his chest.

A small gasp. “Are you okay?” Hat Kid asks.

Snatcher gasps for breath as he finally extracts the clammy mitten from his collar, struggling upright. He grits his teeth in response, and lunges straight for them, wrapping them both in his arms. He’s so completely waterlogged that he may as well be a mop himself at this point.

“Noo! Let go!” Both of them squirm in his grip, laughing hysterically.

He just hugs them closer so that more of the water in his sweater can drench them too. “I’ll take you down with me,” he says breathlessly, and topples over with them onto the floor where they all splash in the remaining puddle. Only once he’s sure they’re as soaked as he is does he let them go. “You are doing the laundry,” he tells Hat Kid.

“Ugh, fine.”

“Hey, our deal said no sassing.”

“Okayy,  _ Dad. _ ”

Technically, that should count as sass, especially given the tone, but he’s too taken aback to retort. Frantically, he turns to her, but she’s already getting to her feet with Bow and sloughing off the liquid from her clothes, seemingly taking no notice of his consternation.

“You three!” Cooking Cat shouts from the doorway, and they’re promptly banished from the kitchen indefinitely.

An hour later, they sit in the laundry room, having bathed and changed. The kids are watching the clothes swirl around in the washing drum, while Snatcher stands in front of the dryer. He feels that recurring sense of being slightly displaced, a bad case of deja vu. For a brief, disorienting moment, he forgets that his life had ever been more than this--where the worst thing that happens is getting mop water in your mouth. The moment passes quickly, leaving him stuttering inside as reality sets in again. Snatcher shakes his head, trying to dislodge the sensation.

The dryer stops, and he mindlessly opens it and pulls out the hot towels he’d tossed in there for a few spins and wraps one over himself like a cloak, inhaling with a smile at the warm embrace. He takes the other two and tosses them over the kids.

“Ack! Hey-oh that feels really nice.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, shoving the towel down over Hat Kid’s face right after she manages to untangle herself.

“Thanks, Snatcher.” Bow Kid has snuggled herself in the towel in mimicry of his method, while Hat Kid mutters bird curses under her breath as she pulls hers back off her head for a second time.

He grunts in acknowledgment and leaves them to their laundry watch. He’s not about to waste his time on something so inane. Instead, Snatcher posts up with another book from Bow. He already finished the first one she gave him within a day. At the rate he’s going, he’ll burn through her collection too quickly.

The chair is comfortable, and so is the towel, summoning memories unbidden of winter days when he used to hang a comforter in front of the fire and wrap it around him and Vanessa. They used to huddle together, eating cookies and watching the snow fall down in front of the tall windows while he read to her until they fell asleep there, leaning against each other on the floor. Outside now, the flecks of white amidst the dark are stars instead of snowflakes, and he’s leaning on no one.

But for a few brief moments in the washing up, things had felt alright, like everything had slotted into its proper place, and he was right where he belonged. If only he still properly believed in stories anymore; at least then it would probably mean something.


End file.
